Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1335892
38 I M PS E . O R G who were all at the top of their game and that's when I realized it could be a career. 2. PLM: How has your skill and experience as a composer aected your process as a music editor? SR: Whenever I'm temping, I always think, "what would I write here?" and then I try to find something existing that's similar to what I'm imagining. It's pretty common for me to layer multiple pieces together. I might find a great temp cue that's 80%-90% there, but then I'll find other bits and pieces and layer them together to really craft it. It's not unlike orchestrating, changing the color, adding weight, or tension or a flourish. Whenever I'm conforming a composer's cue to a new picture, the thinking is, "if I had to rewrite this to fit the new cut, what would I do?" Often I have stems so I can get creative and come up with some pretty elegant and musical solutions. I've also worked on projects where I need to create cues using existing material from the composer. Sometimes it's because things weren't quite working, and the director or producer asks me to come up with a solution. Other times it's by design. Working with Pinar Toprak on Stargirl, I find myself tracking cues frequently. On that show, like most TV shows, she has a lot of music to write in a short amount of time, and we're fortunate to record live strings and brass. Not only does she have to write it all, but we also need to record it. Whenever a theme comes back and I can track a scene, that can save her lots of time not having to score the scene, and it saves time and money because it's already recorded, so we don't need to re-record it. Usually, I'll work with the stems, build a cue, and send it to her. She'll then do some tweaks— adding some elements, changing others, so we end up with a truly new and unique cue even though it's based on something I tracked using existing material. I recently worked with artist Gazelle Twin on Nocturne, which is part of the Welcome to the Blumhouse anthology of films for Amazon. On that film, the process was really interesting because much of the writing was about creating musical Lego pieces of sorts, for me to use and build cues throughout the film. So while the composer wrote some cues to picture, much of the music wasn't written to picture but rather we had different motifs or elements that I would then use to build cues from scratch. That was really fun and creative. The director, Zu Quirke, is a trained violinist, so she's very musical, and the film is set in a music conservatory, which also brought tons of other challenges with lots of on-camera performances. 3. PLM: Would you like to talk about opportunities you have had to step in and score something as you were the closest person to the music and everyone knew you could get it done? SR: I respect composers tremendously and when I'm hired as the music editor, I stay clear of composing—I very much separate my music editing and my composing. Shie Rozow working on Wu-Tang: An American Saga (2019), for which he won his second Golden Reel Award.